Pros

Cons

Pricey.
Requires Hue bridge.

Bottom Line

The Philips Hue Play Light Bars make it easy to bathe your walls in colorful lighting and add some pop to your movie, music, and gaming activities.

Jan. 9, 2019

The Hue Play Light Bars ($129.99 for a two pack) join the growing family of Philips Hue smart lighting accessories that you can control with your phone, voice, and other smart home devices. As with the Hue Lily Outdoor Spot Lights, the Play Light Bars are all about ambience and are meant to provide accent lighting rather than whole room illumination. They're a breeze to install, deliver excellent color, and work well with the Hue Sync app. They're a bit pricey, especially when you consider you need a Hue Bridge to use them, but they're a nice addition to Hue-centric households.

Design and Features

The Hue Play Light Bars come in a pack with two plastic light bars (available in black or white), two vertical stands, two clips for mounting the bars on the back panel of a TV or monitor, double-sided tape and mounting screws, and a power pack. You can connect up to three bars on each power pack, and additional bars cost $59.99 each.

Each bar measures 10.0 inches long, 1.4 inches high, and 1.7 inches wide, and has a white translucent lens covering, a rubberized base with three mounting holes, and a 78-inch power cable. Inside is a 530-lumen LED bulb capable of displaying 16 million colors and 50,000 shades of white. The bulbs are dimmable and rated to last up to 25,000 hours. As with all Hue lights, a Hue Bridge is required for use, but is not included in the kit, so be prepared to shell out another $59.99 if you don't already own one.

The Play Bars use the same Hue Android and iOS app as the Hue Lily Outdoor Spot Lights, the Hue White Ambiance Being Ceiling Light, and other Hue lights. The home screen lists all of your rooms and tells you if the lights are on and what color they're set to. You can dim room lights and turn them on and off, and if you tap a room you can change color and brightness properties for individual lights and turn them on and off without changing other lights in the room. You can also assign one of the preset lighting scenes or create your scene own using the color palette tool.

There are four buttons at the bottom of the screen. The Home button returns you to the home screen. The Routines button takes you to a screen where you can configure Home and Away settings, configure fade on and fade off settings, and set timers to have the lights turn on and off at a specific time of day. Use the Explore button to find out about controlling the Play Bars with Amazon Alexa, Microsoft Cortana, Apple Siri, and Google Assistant voice commands, and how to make them work with other smart home platforms including SmartThings, Vivint, Logitech Harmony, and Nest. You can also create IFTTT applets to have the bars interact with other IFTTT-enabled devices and view a list of third-party apps you can use to control them. This section also contains how-to videos and a link to Hue Labs where you can try out and vote for new formulas and scenes.

Tap the Settings button to connect to your lights from anywhere using your phone, configure the Hue Bridge, add a new Bridge, and set up rooms. Here you can also add new lights and accessories such as Hue dimmer switches and motion sensors, create entertainment areas for use with Hue Sync, and enable HomeKit and Siri control. Hue Sync is a Windows PC/Mac desktop app that lets you sync the Play Bars (and other Hue lights) with music, movies, and gaming action. For example, when synced with movies, the lights will mimic the predominant colors on the screen, and when synced with music the lights will change to the beat. You can also place the Play Bars behind your monitor while gaming to have them change colors that match the action.

Although Hue Sync is a cool app, it only works with content that comes from your Windows or Mac PC and doesn't work with content streamed directly to your smart TV, nor does it work with Blu-ray players and gaming consoles.

Installation and Performance

As with other Hue lighting devices, the Play bars are easy to set up. I already had a Hue Bridge installed, but if you don't have one you'll have to get one to use these lights. I positioned the bars to illuminate a white wall in my living room by laying them flat along the base of the wall. I connected both lights to the power supply, plugged it in, and opened the Hue app. I tapped the three dots in the upper right corner, then tapped Light Setup and Add Light. I hit the Search button and both bars were added as hue Play 1 and hue Play 2 within seconds. At this point you can rename the bars or go back and do it later. I then created a room (Living Room) and added both bars. They were now ready to control with the Hue app. Next I downloaded and installed the Hue Sync app for Windows on my laptop and set up an entertainment area that included both of the Play Bars.

The Hue Play Bars delivered rich colors and a nice range of white color temperatures in my tests. While the lights aren't very bright, they're perfect for mood lighting and they respond quickly to color changes made using the app. They also followed my Routines to a tee. My IFTTT applet to have the Play Bars light up when a Nest Cam IQ camera detected motion worked perfectly, as did my Alexa voice commands to turn the bars on and off.

I synced the lights up to my laptop and used it to display The Avengers: Infinity Wars on my TV, and the Play Bars worked wonderfully, filling the wall area behind my TV with colors that were a very close match to what was being shown on the screen. The lights also synced nicely with Spotify music played on the laptop, though it would be nice to be able to sync up with my music from my iPhone, which I play through my entertainment system. Likewise, I'd love to be able to sync the Play Bars with Netflix movies streamed directly to my TV rather than have to use my laptop as the video source.

Conclusions

If you're looking to add ambient lighting to your home or want to complement your TV viewing, music listening, and computer gaming experience with synchronized lighting effects, the Philips Hue Play Light Bars are a solid choice, albeit a pricey one when you factor in the cost of a required Hue Bridge. That said, the lights are very easy to install and can be controlled with the user-friendly Hue mobile app and with multiple voice commands. They also work with IFTTT applets and integrate with multiple smart home platforms, though in order to sync them up with your favorite games, movies, and music, you'll have to use your Windows or Mac PC as your multimedia source. Ultimately, you'll be rewarded with some very cool mood lighting.

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About the Author

As a Contributing Editor for PC Magazine, John Delaney has been testing and reviewing monitors, HDTVs, PCs, servers, and other assorted hardware and peripherals for more than 14 years. A 13-year veteran of PC Magazine's Labs (most recently as Director of Operations), John was responsible for the recruitment, training and management of the Labs technical staff, as well as evaluating and maintaining the integrity of the Labs testing machines and procedures.

Prior to joining Ziff Davis Publishing, John spent six years in retail operations for Federated Stores, Inc. before accepting a purchasing position with Morris Decision Systems, one of New York's first value-added resellers of the original IBM PC. For ... See Full Bio